


they know god (but i know you)

by celoica



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Horror, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Major Character Injury, Memory Loss, early 2000s
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2020-10-15
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:20:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27022654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celoica/pseuds/celoica
Summary: Steve swallowed so loudly it was a wonder the rednecks at the bar didn’t hear it. “I kissed you. In the locker room. It was right after the fight at Jonathan’s place. You were standing in the locker room and I tried to talk to you, but you wouldn’t even look at me. Your face was all fucked up. I don’t think I did all of it.“And you just looked at me and I just wanted to know what you’d seen. I wanted to know if you knew what we did, but you just looked and you were so close, and I just—”Steve closed his eyes, screwed them shut like he could block out a memory Billy didn’t remember. He licked his lips and said, “You were standing so close to me and it felt like something I should do. And you kissed me back. Billy, you kissed me back. And then you just walked away.”
Relationships: Billy Hargrove/Steve Harrington
Comments: 2
Kudos: 52
Collections: harringrove for Australia





	they know god (but i know you)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [abaddxns](https://archiveofourown.org/users/abaddxns/gifts).



> Covid sucks. I'm sorry for the lateness, my dear. I hope this makes up for it.

He went to Max first.

Filthy and covered in grime, nails a ruined mess from scraping his way through wood and then earth. He could taste the grit of graveyard in his teeth. Fingertips pulsing with the beat of his heart, blood staining his palms, Billy went to Max first.

There were fragments in his head. Little bits and pieces strung together to bigger bits and pieces. There wasn’t a whole picture. He knew who he was. Billy Hargrove—but something else, too. Something ancient that had settled underneath his skin and wore him like a meat suit. A shadow that had swelled inside him, eclipsed the parts of himself that he knew were true, until he’d been something else.

He’d tried to kill little kids.

He’d killed people.

He’d tried to kill _Max_.

It was there, in his head, playing out like a real-time movie he couldn’t look away from. That and the other one—the one with the sunshine-yellow scrunchie in her curly hair, the one who had touched his face and told him she was pretty.

 _She was pretty_.

He looked at his hands, at the ragged nails and torn cuticles. He flexed them, turned them over, inspected his knuckles like they held the secrets to the world. Under the blood were still his scars, the ones he’d put there on Harrington’s teeth and his bedroom wall.

He touched his head, hair shorn short, and his face. Dirt and blood smeared across his mouth. He ignored it, flattened his palm down his throat, across his shoulders, pushing under the collar of his shirt as he stared blankly at his headstone.

 _Loving Son, Brother and Friend_ was stamped neatly across grey granite. _William Patrick Hargrove_ , placed just above it. It was tasteful. Simple. Not worth the effort of something more but worth enough to be nice. Susan must have picked it out.

Billy laid a hand over his heart and felt nothing. No throb, no dull ache, no heavy thud against his palm. 

He’d had a heart before. He could remember that part, the way it had tried to crawl out his throat the first time he’d seen the shadow. At one time, Billy had been alive. A living, breathing thing, with a heartbeat living in his chest.

Billy stared at his hand, looked it over like his heartbeat was hiding behind his torn knuckles. Finding nothing, he pressed his fingertips into his chest until they ached.

There were pieces missing. Little parts that strung it all together, that made it less disjointed. There was something in him—Heather was dead—her _parents_ , Christ, her parents—that girl was there—Max—the overwhelming _heat_ , fire in his lungs and ripping through his system—

He bit his tongue and didn’t taste blood. Thoughts sticking like taffy to the inside of his head, slowing down every thought he tried to pull at, he turned away from his grave and stumbled out onto the street.

_“What is he? Sir? Sir?”_

_“Human, I believe. Take samples.”_

_“Of_ what _?”_

_“His blood. Skin. Nail clippings.”_

_“Sir, he doesn’t have any blood. It’s black.”_

_“Take samples.”_

They locked him away in a white room with no windows. When the eighteen wheeler had skidded across the slippery road and barrelled towards him, Billy hadn’t been shocked when it had crumpled against an invisible wall around him. An accordian of screeching metal and the taste of power buzzing in his mouth, debris had flown passed his head, skidding across the road.

They’d found him, naked and filthy, standing in the middle of the wreck. He hadn’t fought when glove-encased hands had pressed a syringe into his neck. Fighting had always gotten him nowhere fast.

The room wasn’t any bigger than his bedroom, but the walls were eggshell and the bed bare of sheets. _Calming_. It was supposed to be calming. It was supposed to be calming like the woman with black hair and blue scrubs when she came toward him, soft even when she was jabbing a needle the size of his forearm into his chest.

It was supposed to be calming when they strapped him to a slab of metal, cut his hair to his scalp and poked him. The almost white was supposed to be calming when they vivisected his insides, pulled him inside out and watched the parts of him they’d cut out of him grow.

It felt like punishment—what he deserved for what he’d done. There were places people went when they deserved to die. Death would be too gentle, too polite for the things that Billy had done. Almost-white and needles through his heart were maybe all he deserved.

It was punishment for his sins, for the blood on his hands. It was Heather and her parents and everything he had destroyed with his touch before. The dark place he’d been buried inside of when the Mind Flayer had spoken to him with a thousand mouths had barely scratched the surface of what he’d deserved.

_“Sir, he’s crashing—”_

_“He can’t_ crash _! He’s not even alive!”_

_“Sir—sir! He’s bleeding out! It’s—God, it’s coming from his eyes.”_

_“His mouth—"_

_“It’s coming from his mouth!”_

_“The walls—it’s in the walls.”_

_“It_ _is the walls!”_

_A pause. A roar echoing, vibrating._

_Screams. So sweet and cloying._

_He tasted their fear before he devoured them._

Her hair wasn’t as red as he remembered. When he told her, her lip curled up, eyes looking to the sky like it held the answers.

“ _Nice_ ,” Max said, a hand reaching up to tug at her ponytail. “Real nice, man. Don’t talk shit when I saved your ass.”

Billy blinked at the burning sunrise. It was his favourite part of the mornings. The momentary blindness, the hot drench of sun soaking into his skin. Sometimes he woke Max up hours before sunrise, bleary-eyed and exhausted, just to watch it from start to finish.

“It’s nicer,” he said, looking into the sun. Tears pricked his eyes.

Max paused, opened her mouth like she was going to speak before swallowing down the words. She smiled, gentle, and nudged her shoulder into Billy’s. “Thanks.”

“You’re still a dweeb.”

“Hey!” Max hollered, then laughed, then laughed some more as Billy smiled. 

He liked early mornings and the sweet scent of the woods right after it had rained a little. He liked the television, the sound of birds chirping and the taste of imported beer. Hopper was the one to introduce him to that. Watered-down piss-flavoured water wouldn’t do when Hopper had poured him a neatly stacked Guinness for the first time.

He liked when Max came by the cabin, but she was busy with school and a wedding and the life she’d built while he’d been sleeping in an underground room. He got it. He _understood_.

When she’d found him, bleeding and dazed, she’d taken him in like he hadn’t tried to kill her. Like he hadn’t made her feel like shit, hadn’t tried to run her little friends over. Like he wasn’t the piece of shit that hadn’t fallen far from the tree.

“Hey. Hello? Earth to Billy.”

Max was waving her hand in front of his face, a puckered frown pulling at her mouth. He blinked, shook his head and shrugged. 

“You okay?” she asked.

“I’m fine.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, unimpressed. “You were shaking the whole deck.”

“Sorry,” he said, and felt it. “Didn’t mean it.”

“Were you thinking about…” Max trailed off, made an aborted hand gesture and sighed. “You can tell me things. About down there. I get it if you don’t want to, but we can talk about it. My shrink says it’s good to talk.”

“Shrinks are for suckers,” Billy said, half-hearted to his own ears. He reached for the pack of kings tucked into the pocket of his flannel shirt and shook one into his palm. “I’m just tired.”

_“What’s wrong with him?”_

_“What the fuck do you think, Steve?”_

_“I don’t know! Just—look at him!”_

_Hysteria. A shuffle of papers and a flick of a lighter. A laugh that sounded raw._

_“I am! I am looking at him! I thought he was dead.”_

_“We all did! He was supposed to be dead.”_

_“Yeah, well, here he fucking is!”_

_“Stop swearing.”_

_“You’re not my_ _mom.” Perturbed. Annoyed. Childish._

_He remembered that voice._

Steve Harrington, of all people, had been the one to find him, naked and sunburned, rusted red with the weeks-old blood.

He’d screamed like a little bitch and almost ran.

“I didn’t _scream_ ,” Steve said, and sniffed, wiping sweat off his brow. 

It was an unnecessarily hot July day. The cabin the Chief had given him to hide away in didn’t have central air, and the _whirr-whirr-whirr_ of the busted fan he’d pilfered from the decrepit storage shed barely putting a dent in the humidity. 

Steve had suggested cold beer, swimming in a cooler of half-melted ice in the heat. Billy had said yes because it was hot, he was bored, and people had these things called _jobs_.

And it was Steve.

He could never say no to Steve.

“You ran.”

“ _Uh_ , no! I was appropriately freaked the fuck out by you.” Steve shook his head. “I didn’t scream. I _hollered_. It’s different.”

“It sounded like a little girl.”

“Jackass.” Steve tipped his beer toward Billy. Billy eyed him over the rim of his sunglasses. “There’s nothing wrong with screaming.”

“I thought you didn’t.”

“I didn’t, but if I did, it would be okay. That’s equal rights.”

He said it with such seriousness that Billy paused, stared, waited. The pregnant silence broke when Steve laughed, bright and cherry-red. It was sharp and full, slurred like his words from the beer in his stomach. Billy laughed too, because he couldn’t help it.

He hadn’t been able to help it since Steve had slithered into the cabin, situated himself onto the sadly-deflated couch and told Billy to quit moping. It hadn’t made sense in the way that nothing made sense anymore. When nothing made sense, Billy supposed the only realistic thing to do was go with it.

So he’d gone with it, and then Steve had slept on his couch and then his bed when Billy shook at night and screamed like a little girl in his sleep. And then Steve had never said shit about it, even when Billy had fumbled his way into begging to know why Steve was _nice_ to him. Nice like his mother had been, nice like Jane had been in those quiet seconds that had kept him alive in the Upside Down. So nice it made his teeth hurt some days.

The laughter quieted. It was comfortable, not feeling so heavy and unwanted as Billy nursed his beer, until Steve said, “It’s just—you know. We thought you were dead. We buried _you_ , man. ” 

He chuckled. It was lifeless. An anvil dropped in Billy’s stomach and he closed his lips around the lip of his bottle to keep the black tar in his mouth from spilling out.

“You were gone and El was alive, and the Mind Fucker was gone. We didn’t even _look_.” He laughed, again, and it sounded like venom. It burned to hear. “Didn’t even take a trip around the parking lot for you. That was fucked. We could have—I could have—I didn’t even try—”

“Steve.”

There was black seeping from under his fingernails. It was the weirdest part of whatever had happened to him. His nails turned inky black and something black and alien blooming from his mouth, fanning over his skin and covering him as it morphed, broke his bones, twisted his spine into an ungodly shape.

If he looked in a mirror, his eyes would be black.

“Sorry!” Steve said, tossing his beer onto the grass and rolling off the plastic lounger. Face flushed, he kneeled beside Billy, clumsy fingers scrambling over Billy’s thigh, brushing along his cock. 

It burned him up in a different way. The darkness was bile, sour and scorching through him until he was nothing but brittle bone. 

When Steve touched him—brushed fingers, knuckles bumping, elbows nudged—it was like coming home. It was a glow, warm and fuzzy, like when he was in the in-between and lost in his head while the Upside Down flayed him alive. 

Steve kept him human.

“You didn’t—” He bit his words, sighed, fingers clenching on the bottle. He licked his lips. It stained them black, muddy. If he spat on the ground, it would be black, too.

“I didn’t mean—”

“It’s not—”

“—like that—”

“You didn’t _do_ anything—”

“I’m trying to make it better!”

 _“Steve_!”

Steve dropped, back hunched as he slapped his hands across his ears. It pierced. It shattered. It ripped everything alive from the inside out.

Birds took a hasty retreat, fleeing from the trees with a rustle of leaves. Squirrels scattered, bugs burrowed into the ground. A spider froze mid-spin, held itself still and played dead.

Steve’s shoulders shook. Billy stared, mouth ajar. Black tar spilled from the corners of his mouth.

“I didn’t mean to,” he whispered. It came out guttural, like the depths of Hell itself. It hurt his own ears.

It must have been Hell on Steve.

Breathing shallow, he set his beer down, reached out with his other hand for Steve. Steve shook beneath his palm, vibrating. His eyes were closed, head twisted to the side. Shame thick as tar coated Billy’s tongue.

“I didn’t mean—” he started, but it came out as guttural as before, and Steve flinched like he’d been stabbed.

Billy bit his tongue and tasted something close to blood. He jerked away, threw the bottle on the ground. Bit his lip until he tasted sulfur. Sat ramrod stiff because there wasn’t anything he could do that wouldn’t hurt Steve. 

One time, when Billy had been new to the world again, he had screamed and blown Steve’s eardrums. It had taken weeks to heal. Steve still flinched when he opened his mouth.

 _I’m sorry_ he wanted to say, but he didn’t. It would only hurt Steve again.

All he ever did was hurt Steve.

_It talked to him sometimes. The thing that took over, burned him from the inside out. Even ice jammed down his throat hadn’t soothed the burn it had made in Billy. When it spoke, it was so cold. So cold he felt like his heart was glazing over in something that could stop it from beating._

_When the girl with the fire in her eyes had sent him somewhere else, it spoke to him. It spoke to him always, incessant and chattering, rattling in his head while he opened his mouth and screamed nothing._

_It spoke to him about life before. Of his mom, beautiful and bright and sunny, wilting beneath the shadow of his father’s fist. It pulled Max’s pitchy screams, the exhilaration vibrating through his body as he tasted her fear in the Camaro, straight from his head._

_It made him hard, stroked him from the inside out, and spoke in Steve’s voice, until he wept and begged to come and die all at once._

“You’re far from the line, Billy,” Hopper said, hands plunked on his hips like he was scolding a child.

Billy didn’t feel like a child. He barely felt human, but the peeved way Hopper looked down his nose at him didn’t make him feel small. It made him want to fight.

“You made that line up. Not me.”

“You’re close to town,” he said, in a way Billy was sure Hopper thought was reasonable. “We agreed—”

“On nothing. I didn’t agree to shit.”

“You _agreed_ —”

“I didn’t say anything. Not saying anything isn’t the same as agreeing.”

Hopper sighed through his nose. It sounded like it hurt. Billy checked over his hands, looked past Hopper to the rumble of his truck. Beyond the thicket of trees was a winding dirt road that turned to gravel, and then pavement. It led to Hawkins.

That morning he’d woken up and looked at himself in the mirror and realized he had been born in 1967. It was a simple thing. He knew it because it just was, and he never thought about it because it hadn’t mattered.

But Billy was thirty-four and looked no older than he did the day he’d disappeared into the Upside Down.

He needed a drink. Thinking about it hurt his head too much.

“There are rules,” Hopper was saying, loudly, firmly, “and if you follow them, the nice men in lab coats don’t come to town to take you away.”

“Then give me something other than crossword puzzles to do. I’m _bored_.”

“You can’t go into town.”

“I,” Billy spat out from between clenched teeth, “am _bored_.”

Hopper looked him over, sighed again, and scratched his grey beard. Billy had remembered him when he’d been younger, tall and imposing. Everyone over thirty had been old to Billy then, but now Jim Hopper was actually old. Grey beard, lines in his face, a perpetually sore back and a softer belly. 

“Look, kid, you just can’t go into town. It’s too risky.”

“So, what? I spend the rest of my life in this shitty little trailer?”

“That’s not—”

“True?” Billy laughed, hollow. The thought of spending forever alone had been niggling at the back of his mind for months. “It’s been a year. _A year_. You’ve kept me alone for a fucking year. ‘Cause what? I’ll hurt someone? Kill someone?”

“You’re putting words into my mouth. I didn’t say that.”

“Yeah? It sure feels like it. You keep your kid locked up this long, too? I remember her walking around fucking town.”

“That’s different,” Hopper said, and it sounded pained, like even he didn’t believe it. 

“How? How is this any different?” 

“She wasn’t a—”

“Monster?”

Hopper straightened his spine, slow and purposeful, and looked Billy in the eye. Billy returned it, hard, unwavering.

“I knew what you were. Terrorizing little girls, starting fights, vandalizing the principal’s car.” Hopper’s lip curled for a moment. “You beat the shit out of Steve that night. I saw his face. I saw yours, too. And then your daddy died and it all made perfect sense.”

Billy’s jaw clenched, hands spasming. He wondered if his eyes were turning black. 

“No one came to the funeral. And your sister…” 

He turned and looked away from Hopper. A breeze rustled along the tops of the trees. Long grass tickled his bare ankles, like a lover’s kiss. 

The dark abyss swelled in him. It pushed at the surfaces, stretching his nerves to the point of pain. He tasted tar in his mouth, felt something leak from his eyes.

He’d wanted a drink. Maybe seven. Maybe all of them. 

He’d just wanted a _drink_.

Hopper would be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Early retirement, a new two-bedroom bungalow where Joyce could care for him better. 

Jane was the one who told him.

She stood a safe distance back, arms crossed tightly over her chest like a shield. Her delicate jaw was set, hair curling softly around her throat. She wore low-slung jeans and a thick green sweater. It looked like a potato sack on her.

Billy guessed it was Hopper’s.

“Alright,” he said, stiffly, quietly. Sorry didn’t seem like enough. 

“That’s it?” she asked, incredulous. She peered at him over the rim of her glasses. “Alright?”

He shrugged. “What else do you want?”

“My father—” Jane bit off her words, shook her head sharply and squeezed her eyes shut. “My father can’t walk because of you.”

Billy stayed silent. Jane pressed. “Does that mean anything to you?”

Once, he’d been terrified of her. Billy has spent months walking on eggshells and tiptoes around the little woman with wild hair and a delighted, feral smile. She looked older than him now, a few crow’s feet whispering at the edges of her eyes. 

She still scared the shit out of him. He’d felt the crater in the world she had cracked open when she’d banished the Mind Flayer back into its cold existence. 

Billy had fucked her dad. He wasn’t stupid enough to look her in the eye.

“Well?” she asked, harsh and biting. 

Billy shrugged again. “It sucks.”

“That’s the best you’ve got?” Jane laughed, a shriek that pierced Billy’s ears. “ _It sucks_?”

It hurt Billy to shrug again, but he did it anyway.

They stopped coming to see him so much after that. Billy had learned to be alone when Hopper had put him in the cabin, but they had come, at least. At first every day, and then every other day, and then a few times a week. Even if Billy Hargrove came crawling back from the dead, the world still turned, and the demand they attend their day jobs continued. 

He’d understood that. He’d got it.

He even got when they stopped coming after Hopper.

Max dropped by once a week to load him up on groceries and the weekly papers, but she didn’t chatter on incessantly like she used to. Didn’t talk about the internet or the computers they just installed at work. Didn’t tell him about her latest failed date and how her son just wanted his daddy to come home. Didn’t talk about Nancy and Steve or Joyce or anyone at all.

He understood that, too. 

He was the monster after all.

“You’re not supposed to be here,”

Billy sat hunched over the table, nursing a beer that tasted like piss water. He glanced over the edge of his sunglasses.

Steve stood there, hands on hips, a white rag thrown over his shoulder. Billy clenched his fingers around his glass. He heard a subtle _crack_ in the glass. His eyes hovered on the rag.

“I didn’t know you worked here.”

“You don’t know shit.”

Billy bit back a smile. Steve bent over and tapped the glasses sitting on Billy’s nose. “These are obvious.”

Billy took them off, set them on the table. He leaned back stiffly. “What do you want?”

“You’re not supposed to be here,” Steve repeated.

“Yeah, well, no one brought me anything to drink, so I thought I’d come get it myself.”

It wasn’t comfortable. When Billy had been young and human, he’d _sprawled_ , lazy and sure, confident in the way his skin fit his bones. Every move he’d made had been with assurity that he was a fucking god.

Now that he was one, he wasn’t sure how to hold his spine, what to do with his hands. He’d shoved the sunglasses on his nose as a last ditch effort, like anyone would know who he was. He was as forgotten as the rest of the summer of 1985. 

_Just in case_ , he’d still thought, like he wasn’t the fucking moron wearing sunglasses inside a dimly lit bar on a Saturday night.

“Didn’t Johnathan make a grocery run?” Steve asked, brow furrowing.

“He wasn’t much for company. Didn’t even give me any beer.”

“You can’t live off beer.”

He could. He could live off nothing at all, but he didn’t tell Steve that. A three week stretch had left him hungry but alive, and waking up from his sleep with fur and blood between his teeth.

“I can’t live without beer, either,” Billy said, and lifted his glass, taking a calculated sip of his piss-water. 

Steve looked him over, hard, eyes raking him from head to toe. He crossed his arms over his chest and sighed through his nose. “You eaten yet?” 

He didn’t stick around for Billy’s answer, but he came back ten minutes later with a stacked burger with all the fixings and a steaming basket of fries. He sat across from Billy, rag no longer thrown over his shoulder.

In the dim glow of the bar, Steve looked a little different. His hair was a little longer than the last time Billy had seen him, and it fell in his eyes in the way it had when Steve had been young. Steve had crows feet around his eyes and wore glasses when he read. There was a hint of grey at his temples, dusting across the stubble on his cheeks and chin. 

He looked old.

Billy still looked like Billy.

It was a mind-fuck when he thought about it too hard—and Billy had been thinking about it too hard.

“What?” Steve asked, touching his chin gently. “I got something on my face?”

Billy crammed a handful of fries into his mouth and shrugged. “You’re old.”

“You look like an infant.”

Billy scowled. Steve laughed. Billy threw a fry at him and Steve snatched it from the air, before it could bounce off his face. He tossed it back onto Billy’s plate and said, “Now you’re acting like one.”

“At least I’m not old.”

“That’s what happens—”

“—when you’re not trapped in a Hell dimension with a monster?”

Steve went silent as Billy chewed thoughtfully on his burger, elbows on the table like his mom would have shamed him for. 

“You always thought I was a monster, huh?”

Steve was quiet and then shrugged. “You weren’t a saint.”

“I was a kid.”

“We all were. I just didn’t beat the shit out of people who got in my way.”

“Sometimes you did.”

“Not like you.”

He wanted something stiffer than the piss-water, but he wasn’t exactly rolling in money anymore. Billy had never had much of it—his prized Camaro had been a gift from his grandfather, the leather jacket a graduation present—but his pocket change had amounted to something back then. The little cash he did have had been scrounged up from outside, pilfered from Max’s truck.

It had been carefully tucked away under a loose board in the cabin, stashed for the moment he needed it.

It had taken Billy exactly a month to figure out why they put him out in the woods by himself. It was easy at first to say he was too uncontrollable, too unpredictable, and too difficult to explain to the world. Billy could understand that.

Until he couldn’t. Then he realized they didn’t have a plan. Keeping him locked away from the rest of the world for however-the-fuck-long _was_ their only plan. 

“You might be somewhere instead of this cow-shit town if you were a little more like me.”

“I’d be dead if I were like you.”

He didn’t flinch, but it was a close call. “You’d rather I be dead.”

Steve bit his lower lip and sighed. “That’s not what I said.”

“That’s what you meant.”

“Stop putting words in my mouth.”

“Just say it,” he said, and he felt that unholy godlike feeling in his chest swell again. If he looked off the reflection of the bartop, his eyes would be black. “‘Billy, I wish you had fucking died and stayed dead’. Come on. Say it for me.”

Steve swallowed, sitting up in his seat and glancing over his shoulder at the others in the bar. A Tuesday night meant it wasn’t that busy, but in Cow-Shit, Indiana, it was always busy at the local watering hole. 

There was iron and rot in Billy’s mouth as he bit his lip, smiled around his teeth and said, “Don’t be scared, Steve. Just say it.”

Steve didn’t answer, hands flat on the table, eyes flitting between Billy and the others. It sparked rage, twisting deep in his belly and clawing up his throat. 

It spoke to him in anger, whispered heated things about what he could do to Steve’s neck, what he would look like torn inside out and strung out across the bar. He could take them all, it said, soft and delicate, and splay them like a work of art so horrific it would be burned into the memory of the Earth.

He could rip them apart, destroy, _annihilate_ —

Steve reached across the table and grabbed his arm. His fingers dug into the skin of Billy’s wrist and, for a moment, he wondered if Steve would throw himself across the table to stop him, if Billy would crack open his jaws and swallow him whole, when Steve’s hand relaxed, the death grip loosened and he curled his fingers so delicately and stroked across the jut of bone on Billy’s wrist.

Billy trembled.

“What—?” he started, but the words were garbled and choked, caught in his throat like hot tar. He could taste something so cold it burned him leaking from his gums.

Steve shushed him gently, reached over with his other hand to lay across Billy’s heated skin. He touched Billy gently, like fine china, like he was something that could be broken if not tenderly cared for.

He shook, too. Billy could feel it as Steve curled his palm over his knuckles. 

“You aren’t a monster,” he said, but his voice wavered. Billy knew that voice. Max had used it around him, when she wouldn’t look him in the eyes and tried to parse out the trick answer to the question with no right answer he’d given her.

“Hopper—”

“You’re not a monster.”

“Not true. We both know that’s not true.”

Steve swallowed so loudly it was a wonder the rednecks at the bar didn’t hear it. “I kissed you. In the locker room. It was right after the fight at Jonathan’s place. You were standing in the locker room and I tried to talk to you, but you wouldn’t even look at me. Your face was all fucked up. I don’t think I did all of it.

“And you just _looked_ at me and I just wanted to know what you’d seen. I wanted to know if you knew what we did, but you just _looked_ and you were so close, and I just—”

Steve closed his eyes, screwed them shut like he could block out a memory Billy didn’t remember. He licked his lips and said, “You were standing so close to me and it felt like something I should do. And you kissed me back. Billy, you kissed me _back_. And then you just walked away.”

Billy stared, parted lips stained black. His heart beat slowed to a crawl. There was a void where the parts of himself that used to be human used to live. Fragments came to him, some blurry and some startlingly clear, but most didn’t.

He would remember kissing Steve. He should remember kissing.

“I don’t remember,” he said, and when Steve winced and a man at the bar said _the fuck was that_ he knew he was too far gone.

“I know,” Steve said, and there were tears swelling in his eyes. Billy wondered what kind of pain he felt. He wondered if it was a splitting headache or the gnawing hunger. “I forgive you.”

Steve stashed him in the back office while he closed up the bar, lukewarm coffee in his belly and the rest of his burger. He spat black into napkins until it cleared, saliva clear and frothy.

Most of the patrons cleared out after that, claiming headaches and dropping bills off as they had Steve call cabs and wives to pick them up. He sat in the back until Steve came back, taking his hand and leading him to the bar. They listened to Sinatra quietly while Steve scrubbed the grill and mopped the floors.

“I don’t remember it,” Billy said in Steve’s bedroom.

Steve took off his gold watch and stripped off his shirt. There was a tattoo of an anchor over his heart, rope twisting around it. “I know.”

Steve’s apartment was small and cramped, but not cluttered. The essentials were there and if not for the two cups in the sink, he would think no one lived there at all. It wasn’t what he’d imagined when he’d thought of Steve at home.

No art or photos; no throw cushions. No nothing that marked it as Steve’s home.

Steve laid the watch down on his side table, along with his wallet. Billy watched awkwardly from the door, feeling too big for his own skin. The darkness underneath had settled, but it slithered there still, pushing underneath for the moment he bent and gave it a way out.

“I remember the fight, and after, too,” he said, quiet. He felt like a baby predator, prey moving with fluid grace, unsure of his next steps. “I don’t remember kissing you.”

“I kissed you.”

“Why?”

“It felt right.”

“I beat the shit out of you and it felt right to kiss me?”

Steve set his shirt in the wire basket next to the door and shrugged. His skin was damp with sweat, hair slicked back from his eyes with it. “I was a stupid teenager.”

“What are you now?”

“I don’t know. Older. A man, I guess.”

“What’s that make me?”

Steve stood close. If Billy licked the air, he could taste the salt on his skin. His fingers itched to reach out and touch, to trail his fingertips over the trail of hair slipping beneath the waistband of Steve’s jeans.

He swallowed, hard, as Steve tipped his head. A wayward curl flipped over his forehead. “What are you thinking, Billy?”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“It’s hard to answer.”

“You’re a man and I’m a what? A boy?”

Steve smiled, a little lopsided, soft around the eyes. “You weren’t a boy when we were seventeen.”

“Then what am I now?”

He wanted to hear it from Steve, because it had been lingering between them, heavy in the air, since Steve had said the words in the bar. Billy had been swallowing his own tongue, chewing on the idea that there were things that he didn’t remember about Steve.

He thought he knew it all. Harrington was Harrington, but he was Steve, too. He was the man in front of him, and he was a far cry from the King of Hawkins High. 

Maybe it was for the best. Billy hadn’t been Billy for a long time, either.

“Am I just someone you used to know?” he pressed. “Is that why you don’t visit me anymore?”

“That’s not fair.”

“No? Seems really fair. We were hanging out all the time. You came and saw me all the time. I break one spine and you don’t anymore.”

Steve frowned. “Don’t say it like that.”

“I snapped his spine clean in half. He’s never gonna walk again.”

“Don’t say it like you’re not sorry. I know you’re sorry, Billy.”

“What if I’m not?”

“You wouldn’t be in my room if you weren’t.”

Steve was suddenly too close, filling up all his personal space. His eyes burrowed holes into the things he’d hidden before he’d been swallowed by Hell itself. 

Billy licked his lips, tasted Steve on his tongue. Sweat, grease, cedar underneath. He wanted to lick Steve, taste him for what he was. 

He wanted to consume him.

“I—” 

“Don’t talk,” Steve said, softly, and reached out to touch Billy’s chin with his knuckles. Billy shivered. “Just take off your clothes.”

His heart kicked up in his chest, beating along to the heavy throb in the base of spine, spreading from his belly and along his groin. "I've never done this before," he admitted.

Steve's thumb swiped over his chin, down his throat and along his Adam's apple. Billy shook as he tipped his head back and let Steve spread his palm over his throat. His pulse fluttered under Steve's touch.

"We don't have to."

"I want to. I just haven't. I don't remember if I have or not." He paused, swallowed. "I don't think I'll be good at it."

"I don't care. Just take your clothes off."

**Author's Note:**

> As always, you can find me on Tumblr @ celoica.


End file.
